How the travel industry can use IP address data to save money

In 2019, travel and tourism accounted for over 10 percent of global GDP. However, these industries suffered losses of nearly $4.5 trillion in 2020, ultimately contributing less than 4 percent to the worldwide GDP.

Needless to say, from airlines to booking platforms to hotels, 2020 was a challenging year, and the economic rebound for travel-focused industries is going to take time. What many of these companies now need is to conserve revenue while reaching more customers.

The good news is that many consumers have saved up what the U.S. Travel Association calls “revenge” money - money they plan to spend on pleasure trips or other COVID-denied activities. One of the ways to reach these customers (as well as business travelers) is to use IP address data to personalize experiences and conserve revenue during this economic rebuilding phase.

How to use IP address data to conserve travel revenue

Before getting to examples of IP address data in travel tech, let’s look at a few specific ways to use these insights to conserve revenue.

Content localization

Travel tech needs to enable hassle-free site interactions for customers. Say, for instance, a customer from China visits a booking site but the language of the site is Italian. How long will they stick around?

This is just one example of why customized content is important. One way to use IP address data is to change currency, price, and language based on customers’ location. And if there’s no matching version for the location, then the website can default to English.

In other words, by bridging language gaps, travel tech can remove roadblocks in the customer journey and reach more customers.

Content customization

Many industry-leading companies use IP address data to show nearby vacations, destinations, or trips. For instance, booking platforms can show offers in the city their website visitor is from simply by gathering IP insights. Another way travel tech uses this data is to pre-fill forms to improve conversions. All this to say, IP data can help customers find the right content at the right time.

Targeted advertising

Depending on users’ locations, travel tech companies need to show different offers or discounts. Take, for example, site visitors from Siberia. In the winter, these buyers may be interested in trips to Thailand - a popular destination during the cold months.

Or consider customers in the Arabic Emirates. Do these customers typically want to vacation in Israel? The point is this: booking platforms, aggregators, big hotel chains, and beyond use IP address data to pinpoint their advertisements based on location. The result is that buyers can find pertinent offers and discounts for their travel plans.

Fraud detection

Another way to use IP address data is to proactively detect fraud. By way of illustration, if users want to abuse a local discount policy, they can mask their identity using VPNs or proxies (to name a few). However, privacy detection data helps unmask these users so travel tech companies know which users may be trying to work the system.

Additionally, travel tech companies can avoid pricing policy abuse. By double checking user’s IP data and comparing it with credit card locations, these companies can verify the identity of users.

Side note: Since these customers are travelers, strict measures on credit card location can deny valid credit card transactions. That’s why IP address data is best used to double-check buyers’ identities rather than being the only measure of transaction validity. To read more on this, check out this article on pricing policy abuse.

How travel tech uses IP address data

As we’ve helped businesses integrate IP address data, we’ve seen some excellent use cases for these insights in the travel industry. Here are a few that have caught our eye.

Booking platforms

Booking platforms use IP address data in several ways. For starters, companies like Hotels.com or Booking.com use these insights to personalize their website appearance, changing language and currency based on geolocation.

Additionally, Airbnb and Hotels.com use these insights to make local recommendations. For instance, a visitor whose IP address points to Salt Lake City might see these suggestions:

Especially during Covid, local recommendations were high priority since leisure trips were limited or subject to change. Personalized recommendations such as those shown above help travel-oriented businesses offer hassle-free travel plans.

Airlines

Airlines also use IP address data to help customers find the right flight. For instance, Momondo pre-populates forms with location-based data. Simple gestures like these help make researching, planning, and booking trips even easier.

Aviasales uses IP data in a similar way - pre-selecting geolocation for customers. OneTwoTrip, another airline platform, helps personalize customers’ experiences by using geolocation data to show the correct language and currency.

Jetsmart, one of IPinfo’s data users and an airline in South America, uses IP insights to customize content for buyers. As a result, buyers can see offers that are relevant for their location and interests. In short, IP address data is one way many airlines are conserving revenue while offering customized experiences.

Hotel chains

Travel customers don’t always want to do all the thinking. Marriott Bonvoy understands this and offers one-click options for local destinations:

To automate these destinations, they use IP address data to make it easy for customers to find the right vacation and location. In short, these insights help hotel chains automate personalized trips, whether their location is national or international.

Additionally, hotel chains use IP address data to customize languages automatically. For instance, H10 Hotels’ website can be viewed in Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and many other languages depending on viewers’ location.

This is what H10 Hotels had to say about IPinfo’s geolocation API:

“The implementation is very easy and straightforward. The API is very concrete - features are highlighted and that’s it, nothing too fancy. I remember checking out some other services but none of them were easy to use or attractive from an economical point of view.” - Lluís Garceso Espigares, H10 Hotels

In other words, they found that our APIs are designed for easy setup with multiple pricing options based on each customers’ needs.

Booking CRMs

Hotels that use booking CRMs also use IP information to automate content localization, privacy detection, and pre-fill forms for better conversions. For instance, when your customers click on a marketing offer, they’ll go to a page where you’ve already filled in certain details such as country or language to make their purchasing experiences more seamless.

Additionally, Privacy Detection data helps booking sites prevent fraud. Using these insights, these CRMs can pinpoint masked identities such as visitors using VPNs, proxies, tor usage, or others. These sites can then flag these users and prevent them from making a purchase.

This data can also help CRMs thwart web scraping bots and other spammers. Competitors can use this data to gain a competitive edge, and hotel booking CRMs can protect their offers and discounts for valid customers with privacy detection data.

Cruises

Cruise sites also use IP address data to deliver the right content to the right buyer. For instance, a customer in Australia will most likely be looking for cruises leaving from Miami, Florida.

Here’s an example of how Carnival displays the right content based on a site visitor with an IP address in the United States:

On the other hand, website traffic from Australia sees this content:

In other words, those in the travel industry can use IP address insights to reach the right buyers with the best offers. And for companies within travel tech that need to automate personalization while improving revenue, accurate IP address data is an affordable option.

IPinfo is a comprehensive IP address data and API provider with flexible pricing plans to meet your business needs. We handle billions of API requests per month, serving data like IP geolocation, VPN detection, ASN, and more. Sign up for a free account or contact our team to learn more.